Reinnervate 6/14/20

A short poem

Photo: "Blacks Beach" (Film) by Isabella Jamieson Morris

After returning home from freshman year of college abruptly in March, somehow, I felt like I knew simultaneously so much less and so much more than I had when I left. In the few classes that I took I felt like I had learned more than I ever had previously about subjects I had never even known existed. And yet, I realized while I was there and after coming back, how little I knew and had always known.

I had been aware of this for a long time. I had always feared the limitation of my own experience and I had always been afraid of the ways that it skewed my perspective. I felt like my own identity was a weight, a limiting factor to be contended with in truly understanding the world. I felt like I reeked of an irrevocable separateness which I could not wash away.

In our orientation they told us that many people start to get a certain kind of "imposter syndrome" when they walk onto a university campus, having come from their own towns and backgrounds, suddenly faced with a mass of new people and divergent ways of thinking. They told us we belonged there.

I realized then that I was not unique in feeling apart. Especially when I had never had to face institutional marginalization due to any perceivable outward characteristic of mine like so many others had around me. What I realized was that no matter how far away you are from home, how independent you strive to become, you cannot erase everything you came from within yourself nor all that you were taught when you were young.

So without trying to be too pretentious or take myself too seriously, I have been trying to figure out how to reconcile a skewed perspective and limited experience with the potential that lies in truly connecting with others through action and expression.

We all have limited experiences, but it is really only a matter of positive and negative space. To say that something is limited implies that its full capacity is not achieved in its current state. That is to say that something is missing or has been taken away. However, to say that experience is limited is almost oxymoronic, as the expression itself originates from the comparison to a hypothetical situation in which an individual's gathering of experience could encompass all of collective human experience, in which the negative space is all that they have not experienced that others have. Instead we should see the experiences we have in terms of positive space. This collection of ours is a foundation, different for every single one of us, but in order to edge towards a deeper understanding of the world and our role in it, all we can do is jump from where we stand and dive into the pooled knowledge that is everywhere present and take action on behalf of that which we currently know.

This website is really just supposed to be a kind of gathering to facilitate compassionate and receptive transmission. So here's a poem that I hope if not anything else, maybe gets a feeling across.

Reinnervate

Race, unlace the threnody

Lace, relace the flesh

Unspun for fear of pain

Run beneath the skin

Trickle to the brain

The feeling wakens

Stunned

Slackened along the vein

But raking made the twining current

Pluck at kin again

Meet me in the wake

Of fewer rocking lanes

Stay the numbing cold

Hold my thoughts, say my name

Bristling from the wound

Vining nerves rewind the main

Kindred sentience interred

Kindly so, reinnervate